Table of Contents

VOLUME XI.3 May + June 2004

Steven Pemberton

Apparently thanks to the World Wide Web, the idea of personalization seems to be catching on. Most people know about Amazon’s personalizations, which seem to be quite effective. Fewer know about the possibility of personalizing their Web experience based on the languages they speak, presumably because few people speak more…

David Martin, Ian Sommerville

Increasingly, researchers and practitioners acknowledge the importance of understanding the social systems of work or activity into which any technical design solution will be implemented. Field studies (often known as ethnographies) are a way of understanding work as it is practiced. They help us understand "real-world, real-time work" in given…

Marisa Campbell

Contest 2nd InfoVis contest IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2004 Austin, Texas, USA October 10-12, 2004 The InfoVis Contest is a special participation category of the InfoVis 2004. The goal of the contest is to promote the development of benchmarks for information visualization and establish a forum to advance evaluation…

Gitte Lindgaard

In a recent talk, Daniel Rosenberg [13] asked why we were still talking about return-on-investment (ROI) justifications for HCI work. Rosenberg said he had never been asked for an ROI justification in his 20-plus years in the field. That may be true for most practitioners, but if we want our…

Aaron Sklar, David Gilmore

While plumbing the depths of what is worst in life, psychology lost its connection to the positive side of lifethe knowledge about what makes human life most worth living, most fulfilling, most enjoyable and most productive.Martin E. P. Seligman, APA Past President Valuing a Positive Perspective As practitioners of human-centered…

Ned Gulley

I know something you want to know. But will I tell you? Why should I? What’s in it for me? Internet technology makes the simple act of online collaboration easy, but human nature stubbornly resists change. Why should I collaborate with you? What would convince me to share my ideas…

William Hudson

You fought hard for funding, the contractors have finished, and the paint is almost dry. Naturally you want to make sure that your new usability lab earns it keep. But don’t get too enthusiastic about having a full schedule if it means that your development process will suffer as a…

Brian Ganninger

In a recent issue of interactions, Vehicle User Interfaces [4] were given a thorough discussion which included areas to focus and improve upon when developing and using these specialized interfaces. However, there is a somewhat neglected art that is now reappearing in computing circles which could provide substantial new functionality…

Aaron Marcus

In past essays of "Fast Forward," I have pondered the semiotics of the term "user experience." Meanwhile, corporate groups worldwide have been busy carrying out activities under different colors of this banner according to their own interpretations of the concept. At present, many different tribes of the CHI community are…

Gerard Torenvliet

The Myth of the Paperless Office Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper The MIT Press, 2002 ISBN 0262194643 $30.00 This past weekend I hoped to spend some downtime reading a novel. My preferred book was readily available in an electronic format (on my PDA), but I opted for…